The collection that confirmed Larkin as the central English poet of the postwar era, and perhaps the most read English poet of the 20th century after Eliot. His subjects are time, disappointment, England's gradual fade, sex's awkwardness, death's absolute certainty, all rendered in stanzas of such formal perfection that the bleakness becomes oddly consoling. "An Arundel Tomb" ends: "What will survive of us is love." Even Larkin couldn't help believing it.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.